Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Transgender New Yorkers face widespread discrimination, harassment and even violence, resulting in not only great personal harm to themselves but also societal costs to the state as a whole. Still, there is no statewide, comprehensive law to explicitly protect people from discrimination based on gender identity and expression.

The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) would add gender identity and expression to other protected categories, such as race, religion, and sexual orientation, in New York’s human rights laws. GENDA would make it illegal across the state to fire someone from a job, evict them from an apartment, deny them a loan or refuse them service in a restaurant simply because they are transgender. It would also add gender identity and expression to the state’s bias crime laws to help protect transgender people from violence.